WordPress has become the most popular content management system and web publishing platform for implementing a website. Webmasters and website designers appreciate WordPress’ versatility in adapting a wide range of changes, while users appreciate its efficiency and simplicity.

You do not need much website design, HTML and coding knowledge in order to build a website or blog on WordPress. However, as for any other website, one built on WordPress platform needs some SEO love in order to increase its organic traffic. Only increased website visitors can lead to success, business growth, and profitability for online-based business.

Do not make the mistake to believe that WordPress websites are already optimized for search engines out of the box. It is true that WordPress platform is search engine friendly, but for best results you’ll still need to apply some good SEO techniques. For this reason, below we address here some SEO tips for advanced WordPress.

#1: Install a Good WordPress SEO Plugin

There are two plugins for WordPress SEO that are most popular: WordPress SEO by Yoast and All In One SEO Pack. You can choose any of them for your website. You may also need additional plugins for your analytics tracking code. However, you will still need to optimize your blog or website for SEO because the plugin is not a turnkey solution. SEO is an ongoing and continuous process. First step is to configure your WordPress SEO plugin correctly.

Take care of any modifications that the new plugin can make to your website’s code. Optimize your blog or website content for some specific keywords based on your SEO research and analysis. This will help you attract new prospective customers, engage them and convert them into buyers.

#2: Choose a Solid WordPress Hosting Solution

Your choice should be based on several factors, such as ease of installation, cost, and web server management. A virtual private server solution is recommended, if you can afford the time and resources to deal with backing up data and restoring the site, upgrades, and hosting costs.

In case that you cannot afford a VPS choose at least a managed WordPress hosting solution that will handle your administration, security, technical, and performance issues for a modest fee. In choosing your web hosting provider take into consideration some factors such as support for plugins, backup and restore, staging environment, web hosting provider reputation and expertise.

#3: Avoid Certain Design Themes

Choose carefully your free WordPress themes, since some of them may affect your SEO. Consider the following aspects when chooing SEO-friendly WordPress themes: no spammy links, support ensured for future theme’s updates, review of other users, the them should follow the best SEO practices and Google’s Guidelines, and mobile friendly.

#4: Install Your WordPress Website Mindfully

The options include a subdomain, new domain, or a subfolder. In case that you already have a business website and want to create a new blog, installing WordPress on a subdomain a better choice than installing on a new domain. On a subdomain will be easier to implement your SEO strategy. An even better solution for SEO is to host your new blog on a subfolder.

#5: Ditch Auto-H1 WordPress Themes

Do not choose a WordPress theme that uses multiple instances of H1 tags per page. That can affect your SEO because multiple H1 tags can be seen as spammy and therefore harm your organic search rankings. The best SEO practice is to use H1 just for your first heading.

We hope that our practical WordPress SEO tips will help you in achieving better ranking results with your website or blog.